Why are Private Profiles in Comp a thing?

Competitive Discussion
1

I know this is a topic that has probably been discussed numerous times, but it’s finally gotten to me as a player and I just wanted to share my input.

First - Your own teammates : If we want a truly competitive environment and want your team to play heroes to the best of there ability, shouldn’t we see what everyone plays? If you want to try out a hero, there is quickplay or plenty of arcade modes to allow you to better yourself at that hero and prepare yourself for comp.

Second - Enemy Teammates : Am I the only one who would examine every player’s profile on the enemy team before the start of the game? If they had a one trick widow, I would recommend we go dive before the start of the match, etc. It was also just a neat feature being able to hover over a name and quickly see there hero pool from comp that season.

Third - Smurfs/Throwers : All this does is literally encourage smurfing/throwing. Players that have knowledge of the game can now easily drop down the ranks with an extremely low win percentage without anyone seeing it. I’m pretty sure these people can soft throw to where no one actually knows they are throwing and just falling down to stomp on us low ranks.

Ex) Last night, I had a game on Hanumura (2900 SR Game) where the other team had a level 50 diamond paired with another player. His profile was private so we couldn’t see exactly what rank he was. Anyways, that guy was playing Orisa and was just not pushing past choke. He was just putting his shield down and only pressing S when we destroyed it. We were doing very well because of this because there team could not push without him. They kept turning around looking at him and we knew they were angry with him because he just wasn’t doing anything. So, 30 seconds left on first point he goes tracer and literally one clipped 3 people in a row. They took the point and then steam rolled the second point. The following round, we didn’t make it past the choke because he was hard focusing our healers and literally no one could do anything about it. I’ve come across very few smurfs to just get hard rolled in plat, but this one really got to me.

Short: Private Profiles should not be a thing in comp. If you don’t want the toxicity of other players wanting to win and wanting you to play a hero you’re familiar with, then don’t play comp. We want to have fun, but we also want to WIN in comp.

4 Likes
2

I think this change was driven primarily by European privacy laws.

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3

Nothing supports that and zero laws worldwide protect video game data. This is not health/financial/etc information with real world applications; this is how well you shoot cartoon characters in a video game.

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4

Welp, that would make sense I suppose, but don’t really see why they would pertain to a video game ha.

5

My understanding is that it’s the measure of time to infer things about you, e.g., you played between these hours and these hours, because I can see a change to the amount of hours you have on Mercy since I checked last. I can see you said you were at the doctor’s but logged a few QP games under Junkrat, you sick bastich.

6

Crazy world we live in lol. We should play some more again btw! It’s been a while ha and we’re both stuck in plat it looks like :smiley:

7

Totally! I see you on all the time, but you’re a few hundred SR ahead and would feel bad dragging you down. I stopped playing comp when they put those Brig changes on the PTR and have been learning Sombra in QP. If you’re interested in QP, I found a really nice group of folks to play with and will invite you along some time :slight_smile:

8

In my opinion, Prvate Profiles are the best thing the OW team added to the game.

Ever.

4 Likes
9

Yea for sure - send me a message! I solo que 90% of the time so I’m definitely up to play some.

10

I dislike private profiles, but I’m thankful I have the option. It’s almost necessary when I want to play something other than Support in competitive for once.

11

Why are public profiles in comp a thing? All they do is promote toxicity and don’t actually accomplish anything useful.

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12

private profiles are for those that got hamstrung into a role that they don’t like. i used to play a heck of alot of dva so naturally i got stuck playing her constantly, it got to the point where if i didn’t pick dva, people thought i was throwing and would rage. now i am a very good winston, reaper, zen, etc. but i was never allowed to play those chars without the team freaking out and crying ( not always but a good chunk of time). when private profile went live i was able to play other chars and a lot of time do just as well as i did on dva. sure i will still play dva from time to time if needed but the private profile allowed me to enjoy the game more without being moaned at by the other 5 players on my team.

2 Likes
13

I mean yea it allows the toxic people to come out and voice their opinion, but the other half just simply wants to know how well you perform on said hero along with the other team’s hero pools. If I have someone insta lock mccree with an average accuracy of 30% and no way of knowing that and they don’t switch - you minus well give it your best 5v6 effort. I understand they want to play mccree, but comp is not the place for it…
My thing is private profiles literally promote throwing. You wan’t to drop two tiers without anyone knowing and then just curb stomp low rank players - go right on ahead…

2 Likes
14

A player who is going to throw will do so regardless of whether you can see his/her profile or not

15

I mean it will allow more reports when you see a 10% win rate on all support/tanks and 90+% win rate on dps heroes. Now, your team is just like he was just playing well and our team sucked. No, he was a GM hard carrying them…but we have no way of proving that because we can’t see stats. The enemy player simply “played well” in the rank he is in…

16

Private profiles are in my opinion one of the very best things to ever be added to this game

1 Like
17

I’m curious. Let’s suppose Blizzard does away with private profiles, and you see someone on your team instalock McCree with 30% or less accuracy. What would you do about it?

18

Or what could you do, keeping in mind that reporting the player in the stated case would be breaking the rules of the game

19

Private profiles protect people from harassment and being forced into hero selection. I wish it didn’t have to be that way, but people suck.

Just think about some of the pro public profile arguements, half of them are talking about how it’s nice to help you assess your team’s potential. What they are really saying is I want that Mercy main to play Mercy whether they want to or not and I want to be able to tell McCree to switch because I do not approve of their accuracy, and what else can I force on others to make sure I can play how I like?

1 Like
20

Players who want all profiles public for the reasons you stated hete are in my opinion the primary reason they need to be private